Colored music notation system and method of colorizing music notation

Abstract

A colored music notation system and a method of colorizing music notation using seven colors that are easily distinguishable from one another, representing the seven unique notes in an octave. The color of a note may be chosen from a list of colors in CMYK format, with a tolerance of plus or minus ten points, preferably plus or minus five points in attributes for any of the colors. The colors may be reproduced by any printing method, including using a conventional personal computer. The colors are easily reproducible within acceptable tolerances on a wide variety of media and with a range of printing options, can be read under various lighting conditions, and do not make written music unpleasant to the eye. The colors are also sufficiently different to allow for easy recognition of common chord combinations by the recollection of simple groups of colors. In the preferred embodiment of the invention, notes affected by an accidental are the same color as the natural note to which they are related. The invention also provides a method for applying color to the keys a keyboard instrument.

Description

FIELD OF INVENTION[0001]This invention relates to music notation. In particular, this invention relates to a colored music notation system and a method of colorizing music notation.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Standard Music Notation (SMN) is a method of writing what is commonly known as “Sheet Music” or “Musical Scores,” to graphically represent a piece of music in a form that is familiar to and understood by musicians. SMN is a system that has developed and evolved over the course of several hundred years, and is almost universally accepted as the standard method for representing music graphically.[0003]Standard music notation involves the positioning of note characters on one or more staves or staffs. Each staff consists of five lines and four spaces, each of which represents a particular musical tone. The sequential lines and spaces represent sequential tones, and the note characters differ according to the duration of the note. While there are relatively few note characters...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]The present invention addresses these disadvantage by providing a colored music notation system and a method of colorizing music notation using seven colors that are easily distinguishable from one another, representing the seven notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, and G) in an octave.

[0018]The colors used in the present invention are easily reproducible within acceptable tolerances on a wide variety of media and with a range of printing options, allowing portability from professional printing systems to low cost home printers. The selected colors can be read under various lighting conditions, and do not make written music unpleasant to the eye.

Problems solved by technology

It is accordingly considerably more difficult for most people to learn to mentally translate the position of each note character to the position that will generate the indicated tone on a musical instrument (e.g. the correct key on a piano, the correct string and fret on a guitar, etc.).

This is especially problematic during a fast musical passage, where the mind has little time to process the position of the note character and translate it to the corresponding tone on the instrument.

Thus, for most people the only difficult aspect of learning to read SMN is being able to determine in an instant what tone is being represented by a note on the staff.

There have been many attempts over the years to modify or replace SMN because of the general level of difficulty that most people seem to have learning this system.

Most of the new methods proposed require a total change in how the music is annotated, and therefore such methods have never been successfully implemented because musicians who have taken the time to learn SMN to the point of proficiency will resist switching to an entirely or substantially new system.

These systems utilize too many colors and combinations of colors for most people to recall in the short time span available between notes in a musical composition.

However, some proposed seven color systems also increase complexity in an attempt to aid in the memorization of the note color combination.

This further limits the system to the English language; if it were desirable to translate this system for use in another language, say French or German (or even more cumbersome, Greek, Hebrew or Russian), new color names would have to be used in each language, thus precluding universality of the system.

Moreover, all of these systems add multiple changes to SMN that clutter the staff, and / or introduce unorthodox changes that deviate too substantially from the conventional music notation system and thus will not be accepted by mainstream users of written music.

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